


Betrayals

by Bitterblue



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Backstory, F/F, Trans Delphine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 11:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9819026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitterblue/pseuds/Bitterblue
Summary: Pre season 1 through the end of season 1, stand alone. Delphine's journey to and away from Neolution as a young trans woman.





	

The brochure is excessively glossy. It's an inane thought to have, and it's the first thing that flits through her mind when the woman at the table hands it to her. The woman's smile does not reach her eyes. **  
**

She opens it later, between reading about the bioethics program being offered in Helsinki and the post-doc placement rates from Harvard. The tri-fold paper briefly explains the program: a fully-funded place at one of six universities across Europe to complete an MD/PhD program for exceptional students looking to specialize in a range of subjects, with a paid position upon finishing. Photos of various projects from previous years' successful students are placed strategically between shots of pristine labs and high-rise buildings. The caption of one catches her eye: _Truc Nguyen created novel surgical techniques with promising applications for transgender women._

* * *

 

She applies, of course. She agonizes over it for a week or two, not because she has any doubt about her qualifications (she has _never_ doubted those), but because she still hasn't settled on a name yet and she wants to do this correctly. She's vacillated between names for years, now: first, in _lycée_ , Amelie, and then for a while Camille.

Delphine Beraud is born on a scholarship application form funded by Dyad.

* * *

 

The first time she meets Aldous Leekie, at a small party hosted by her scholarship coordinator and her academic advisor in her honour, she's charmed. He has the knack of making whomever he speaks with feel like the center of everyone's attention, and Delphine has found that she enjoys attention, now that her skin feels more like it fits than it ever has before. (It's amazing what a syringe and synthesized, bioidentical hormones can do.) She doesn't even mind when he touches her shoulders a few too many times to play it off as unintentional.

He brings up the ideas of Neolution that evening casually, as if she would ever _not_ be interested in becoming the best and truest version of herself through scientific intervention. Delphine thinks of syringes and needles and laughs in all the right places at his jokes.

* * *

 

It's not that she doesn't _want_ to have surgery, it's that she never quite finds the time. She wants it desperately, with her whole person; she's read the papers Dr Nguyen has published about his techniques and the patient outcomes between lab courses and exam preparations. His results are written in the somewhat condescending, paternalistic, vaguely transmisogynistic tone she expects from published medical research: " _At 6 months follow up post op, the majority of patients who underwent the new method were indistinguishable from natal women._ " She rolls her eyes at "natal women" and intends to ask Leekie about accessing the surgery herself and then there are labs due and her own research is briefly stalled and it never quite happens.

* * *

 

The job she is given after finishing both degrees, a fully-qualified physician and immunologist, is, functionally, nannying a grown adult woman.

Leekie presents it to her as a fantastic opportunity (" _Not everyone gets to work on Leda, Delphine, it's truly because you're_ exemplary."), and she's definitely curious about the idea that Dyad successfully cloned humans and they are her own age, but the assignment chafes at her. It's beneath her, to track a subject like this.

Then she reads Cosima's file.

* * *

 

There are files on all of the clones, and she's allowed to read any of them she likes (" _Privileges_ ," Leekie promises), but Cosima is more than enough reading material for her. There are stacks of medical reports, yes, but scattered throughout are snippets of an incandescent woman. She's just completed a master's at UCSF and is on her way to Minnesota to start a PhD. (Delphine wonders at a woman who would stop graduate studies at one school to transfer to another and change specialties, thinks of every scandal she has studiously avoided with men who look just a touch too long for their wives' comfort, and hopes it's just for the academic opportunities.)

Delphine volunteers to meet her in person, to update the files, to keep Leekie abreast of the subject and her studies.

There are absolutely no ulterior motives. And she also does not keep a candid photo she finds tucked between academic transcripts. That would be absurd.

* * *

 

The reams of information about Cosima have made a number of things quite clear: she is deeply inquisitive, but maybe not quite skeptical enough at times; she is potentially becoming self-aware (and thus experimentally very valuable); she likes pot but not so much alcohol; she likes women. Delphine knows that her previously assigned monitor had been in an intimate relationship with Cosima. She knows there's the possibility she may be called upon to do the same. Delphine _also_ knows some lesbians who don't think she should count, as if she chose to go through the trouble of being assigned male at birth and all of the legal and medical hoops that have accompanied that poor choice. She frets. She'd been too busy to find out about this surgery that had lured her to Dyad in the first place, and now there's no time if she's going to play a believable student - the kind who should be punctual for their classes.

The only thing worse than her subject accidentally falling in love with _her_ would be, she thinks, having her subject recoil in horror at her body.

She tries not to think of it at all, because what are the chances that Cosima would feel that way about her, anyway. She hides the photo she definitely didn't keep in the box that holds her favourite books when she moves to Minnesota.

* * *

 

She has to change her name again when she becomes Cosima's monitor. Leekie warns her that it's imperative she respond as if it had always been her own, that she must not give away her part in all of this, and Delphine tries very hard not to laugh in his face. She is the most qualified person they have ever had for this specific task.

* * *

 

Cosima smiles at Delphine like she is a secret that only Cosima knows, which should be off-putting. Smiles like that have been dangerous before.

(Delphine doesn't even put up a token resistance to being sucked into the orbit of Cosima and Cosima's life. She tries to remember to bring Cosima around to Neolution. She does. She makes notes on her subject, monitors her progress and how close she appears to be to self-awareness. But she would gladly give up everything to keep seeing that dangerous smile.)

(Worse, Cosima seems to _know_.)

When they kiss, because it is inevitable that they would kiss, because everything about Delphine's life feels as if it has been inexorably leading to the sensation of Cosima's hands on her shoulders, eagerly pushing Delphine's sweater up and away, Cosima doesn't flinch at the feeling of their bodies pressed together. Worries scatter, Delphine letting them dance away on the smoke of the incense still burning in one corner and attempting to cover the marijuana smell in the stuffy apartment. (" _I don't sleep with people with dicks_ " shivers away as Cosima holds her hips and grinds against her, teeth sharp and smiling into Delphine's neck.) (" _I knew you were like_ this" dissolves under the feeling of Cosima's tongue on the skin just below Delphine's breasts.)

Delphine forgets to worry about anything at all under Cosima's eager, delighted touch. Better yet, Cosima does not comment about any of what she finds as she peels Delphine's clothes off in the search for further skin to touch.

After, new worries find her lying in Cosima's sheets, tangled and tired. One secret down, one to go, and with it everything holding Delphine Cormier together as a person.

* * *

 

"You _can_ trust me," she promises. Pleads.

Cosima doesn't throw any of her transition back at her, for the first time in Delphine's life. She is _betrayed_ , because Delphine can only betray people, has been made to betray people, has built herself to betray people, but not about _that_. That hadn't bothered her. That she trusts.

Staying true to Cosima means betraying Leekie, and Neolution, and the idea of a perfect self, created exactly in the image she has in her mind. It means betraying the body she imagined, the reasons she joined Dyad to begin with. It means betraying the decade of work she has put into being the right person in the right place.

Delphine thinks about Cosima's touch, the lack of hesitancy, the desire. _This is not a lie, it's not possible._

_I'm on your side now._

_Please believe me._


End file.
